W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA and Assistive Technologies Community Group Weekly Teleconference

18 June 2025

Attendees

Present
ChrisCuellar, dean, elizabeth, howard-e, Isa, james, jugglinmike, louis, Matt_King
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
jugglinmike

Meeting minutes

Review agenda and next meeting dates

https://github.com/w3c/aria-at/wiki/June-18%2C-2025-Agenda

Matt_King: Requests for changes to agenda?

Matt_King: Hearing none, we'll keep the agenda as planned

Matt_King: No meeting Thursday June 26

Matt_King: Next meeting: Wednesday July 2

Next AT Driver Subgroup meeting: Monday July 14

Matt_King: Next AT Driver Subgroup meeting: Monday July 14

Current status

Matt

Matt_King: No major changes to the status this week, though we did have some important updates

Matt_King: Still 15 in "candidate review" and 4 almost rady

Matt_King: Isa and louis have made good progress

Matt_King: The JAWS report for "roving tab index" is now up-to-date

Isa: there is still one conflict with slider

Matt_King: Yup; we'll discuss that later

Matt_King: We have tabs coming up, but as usual, some of the test plan turned out to be more complicated than Isa and I anticipated, so we're still getting that ready for people

Matt_King: I forgot to check with Isa about "vertical temperature slider". We have the app changes and APG changes in place, so it's now just a matter of making the small changes to the arrow commands

Isa: I think I can prioritize that so we can complete the report by the end of Friday

Matt_King: Great! Even though we're not having a meeting next week, we can still try to move things forward asynchronously

Matt_King: It was just a couple tests where we need to circle back with people

Isa: PAC will be closed the entire first week of July

Matt_King: Ah, okay. If we have enough people available, we can still make progress

Matt_King: Hopefully we can get everything we need from Isa and James lined up asynchronously so we can still make progress that week

Matt_King: Thanks for calling that out, Isa

Isa: We can also work on the other disclosure--the FAQ one

Matt_King: Oh, right. We can adjust our plan accordinly

Matt_King: In early July, we could end up with a lot of things ready for testing

App issue 1430 - Improvements to new experience for marking commands untestable

github: w3c/aria-at-app#1430

Matt_King: This is a pretty big change!

Matt_King: I want to talk about what's changing in the testing experience

Matt_King: In every single command, you're now going to see another checkbox

Matt_King: Right after the "output" field, there is a new checkbox that you check if, for some reason, when you execute it that the screen reader behaved in such a way that you can't answer the assertions

Matt_King: For example, if the screen reader was supposed to move to a button, but it didn't move to that button, you can't answer questions about the behavior of the button

Matt_King: If you make it as "untestable", then you have to answer a question about "why" it was untestable.

Matt_King: We automatically check the box which says that "there were negative side effects", and you need to designate why it was untestable, mark that reason as "severe", and then add a description with additional context

Matt_King: Isa and I did some testing before it rolled out, shared some feedback regarding three issues that we would like resolved

Matt_King: This issue is capturing one part of that feedback

Matt_King: Today, I want to talk through the details of issue #1430 and make sure that people are in agreement to the solutions to the problems that are raised by issue #1430

Matt_King: In my issue, I first tried to make sure that we would be aligned on exactly what the problems are

Matt_King: There were three problems. First, we have a label on the checkbox that is kind of hard for screen reader users to understand (and in fact, Isa pointed out that if the command was, like, the letter "b", you could read it and understand whether the letter "b" was the letter "b" or the word "b" just because of the way the label was phrased)

Matt_King: Then, after you check the box, we didn't have clear instructions about what you have to do next (which is to record what was untestable)

Matt_King: And third, if you submit the form without explaining what was untestable, there wasn't a clear message, and the focus didn't jump back to a location that was as helpful as it could be

Isa: I agree with all of that

Matt_King: On the first two issues (understanding what the label is and what it means), I feel like this is one of those situations where we ended up with a really long label because we wanted to be clear with testers about what it means. Once people understand it, they don't need such a long label

Isa: Right, it's overly verbose at that point

Matt_King: So I'm proposing that we use a shorter label along with a description. For the label, I simply wrote, "command is not testable", and for the description, it says exactly what that means

Matt_King: I'll copy that into the minutes, if it's helpful...

<Matt_King> description: Description: Executing 'COMMAND_NAME' affected behavior that made assertions untestable. If checked,

<Matt_King> then at least one severe negative side effect must be recorded below.

Matt_King: Is this good?

Isa: Sounds good to me

Isa: Testers who are more familiar with the platform, or the ones who are going to be running the test: is it clear why we are checking the checkbox? Is that instruction clear?

louis: from the verbal discussion, it does make sense

Dean: Agreed

louis: of course, when we see it in person, we may have a different opinion. But conceptually, it makes sense

Matt_King: If you try to submit a form with a side effect with a side-effect recorded, but you didn't put a description of the side effect, does that result in an error? I didn't check that

Matt_King: There are two error conditions: one is that they didn't input any side effect, and another is that they designated a side effect but they didn't give it a description

Matt_King: Are we all aligned: when you press "submit" and there are three errors on the form, focus should return to the first one, right?

Isa: Yes, that sounds right to me

Matt_King: Then I think we can give this one the green light!

jugglinmike: Carmen is out today, but she will see the minutes

Re-run JAWS report for color viewer slider

Isa: louis did the heavy lifting here

louis: "shift+f" didn't give the right output

louis: so my results were still the same as Hadi's on that one

Isa: Joe_Humbert is the other tester

Matt_King: Joe is not here today

Matt_King: So louis's output matched Hadi's when he was going backwards

Matt_King: This is similar to what we saw in radio group

louis: Now, the interesting thing is that if I sort of go off-script and just tab back-and-forth, then it will start reading

Matt_King: We noticed "shift+f" (I believe) in the "roving tab index" radio group

Matt_King: Just in some weird edge cases, "shift+f" works differently from "f"

louis: It's the oddest thing. I'm not sure what's going on. Eventually, you can get it to read if you mess around with it enough, but that would still be considered a failure

James: I cannot reproduce that. It announces the min and max value every time for me

James: The wording and lack of pause is somewhat questionable, but that aside, it isn't giving me any issues

Matt_King: I wonder, for this, because Joe isn't here...

Isa: I wonder if this is another Windows 10 versus 11

louis: I'm on Windows 11

Matt_King: There is no issue number for this

Isa: I don't get min and max here on my machine

Isa: I do get the "slider" role

Isa: If I maximize, I still don't get the min and max

Matt_King: I'm getting the "min 0 max 255" with "shift+f" on Windows 11. I'm running a JAWS beta that I think is just after the May update

James: I am not running a JAWS beta, and I'm running Windows 10

louis: I got mine to work. I hit the "run test setup" button and then I toggle PC cursor off and on

Matt_King: I refreshed the page, the focus is on the "run test setup" button. I press "enter", and JAWS announces the link, and then I press "shift+f", and it actually says "color viewer group left right slider 128 min 0 max 255"

louis: I did exactly what you did, and I got "color view group left right slider 128"

louis: But if I refresh it, press "run test setup", toggle virtual PC cursor off and on, then press "shift+f", I get the expected output

louis: But it seems every time I look at this, I observe something different

Isa: It's iconsistent

Matt_King: Are we all on Chrome 137 point something?

louis: I am

Matt_King: I don't know what to think of the extra step that Louis is inserting in order to get it to work

Matt_King: I don't have to take that extra step, and neither does James

Isa: But I do need to insert the extra step

Isa: And I'm on default settings

louis: It depends. If I reload it, and I run it five times, then on the fifth try, I may get it to read

Matt_King: By the way, I did maximize the window with the example, but that didn't change the behavior

louis: I have my Chrome default to maximize

James: For ARIA-AT, the popup does not open maximized by default even if Chrome maximizes by default

louis: For what it's worth, I ran it both on default settings and my configuration. That didn't make a difference

Matt_King: I don't know why it says "group"

James: Because there are multiple sliders, so they're in a group

James: I just reproduced the bug

James: Is there something wrong with this example?

James: I'm on Windows 10

Matt_King: The other people who are not getting the announcement (consistently), they are on Windows 11

Isa: I don't think there's anything wrong with the example

Matt_King: When I "shift+tab", I don't hear "group"

Matt_King: I've done it now many times, and I'm getting the "min"/"max" announcement every time (on the test page specifically)

Matt_King: I want to figure out a path out of this hole

Matt_King: We have something that's flaky, but we don't know the conditions for the flakiness...

James: Is this in a pull request or on "main"?

Isa: It's on "main". It's a conflict

Isa: For the record, it's only with JAWS. For the others, the behaviors are met

James: NVDA doesn't read "min" and "max", though, so it fails

Isa: Yes, that's right

Matt_King: In the ARIA-AT test case, I can't get it to fail no matter what I do. I am on a slightly later build of JAWS, so that could be a factor. I'm on Windows 11 and the same version of Chrome

Isa: Now I got the min and max, just by re-opening the test page

jugglinmike: Is this untestable? A room full of people can't agree on the behavior, and that seems like a precondition to testing to me

Matt_King: I've got to figure out how to move us off of this topic, but I'm honestly feeling a bit stuck

Matt_King: Do we wait for the next version of JAWS? The next beta release is in July, which isn't that far away now. We could hang out for a while and see if this gets better

Matt_King: James is right to question the integrity of the test case itself, but we're not finding any problems, there

Matt_King: I guess, with lack of a better option at this point in time, I'm kind of feeling like we should put this on ice until the July release

Matt_King: If there was a bug, Vispero would want the bug to be associated with the July release, anyway

Matt_King: I appreciate everyone's energy and enthusiasm in geeking out over a specific test case!

Matt_King: We're very close

Run of accordion test plan

Matt_King: We'll skip this for now

Conflicting results in Rating Radio Group

Matt_King: Dean had output that was completely different than the other testers, and I'm wondering if that came from Dean or from the bot

Matt_King: Do you think you could re-run the test, Dean?

Dean: Sure

Dean: This may be a version thing, too. I'll have to check

Isa: This is the issue with the laptop key

Dean: Ah, right, then I got a cheap external keyboard

Dean: That allowed me to do it, but I don't know why there was a conflict. That was a while ago, so I'll have to look again. I'll do that today

Matt_King: This might have been bot output and not your output, but if you could manually go to test 14 and 15 and re-run them and make sure that the output that is recorded is accurate, that will move us forward

Dean: I will do that

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

All speakers: Dean, Isa, James, jugglinmike, louis, Matt_King

Active on IRC: ChrisCuellar, howard-e, jugglinmike, Matt_King